#098 - A Doctor In Everyone's Pocket with Google DeepMind's Vivek Natarajan

This week on GAEA Talks, Graeme Scott sits down with Vivek Natarajan, Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, where he works at the intersection of AI, science and medicine. Vivek is one of the people most directly responsible for bringing large language models into healthcare, and this is one of the most genuinely hopeful conversations we have recorded on the podcast.Vivek grew up in Tamil Nadu, India, where he watched people walk thirty or forty miles in extreme heat, give up a day's wages or go without food to see a doctor. His uncles ran eye camps in nearby villages, sending out flyers a year in advance because that was the only reliable way to get people to come and be examined. That experience never left him. As an undergraduate he and a few friends tried to build an app called Ask The Doctor Anytime, Anywhere. The technology was not ready. He came to the US for graduate school, joined Facebook AI Research in 2014 in the early days of deep learning, and then moved to Google to join the newly formed Medical Brain team under Greg Corrado, co-founder of Google Brain. He has now been at Google and Google DeepMind for seven and a half years.Filmed in our new London studio, this conversation covers the full arc of medical AI. Vivek walks Graeme through the early specialised vision models his team built for detecting skin conditions and breast cancer from mammograms, why those supervised approaches kept breaking the moment they left the hospital they were trained in, and why the arrival of large language models changed everything. He tells the story of the moonshot proposal he and Dr Alan Karthikesalingam wrote over dinner in 2022, which fifty colleagues signed up to within a week, and which became Med-PaLM, one of the first specialised medical LLMs. Within months it was achieving expert-level scores on US medical licensing exam questions. When the paper went out over the Christmas break of 2023, the heads of many of the world's top health systems contacted Google asking for access immediately.